Case Study - SMAPS Ltd.

2018

Overview

SMAPS was a Digital Marketing Institute based out of Bangalore, India. They provided offline programs in 

  1. Website Planning and Development
  2. Search Engine Optimization
  3. Search Engine Marketing
  4. Web Analytics
  5. Social Media Marketing

These courses were provided offline at their training center in Bangalore. They had multiple batches of courses running 7 days a week. They were also expanding into other realms of IT training. In order to improve their Market presence, and visibility, it was decided to improve digital footprint by creating the Company’s website and reaching out via social media platforms.

My Role

SMAPS hired me as a Trainer for Digital Marketing, SEO, and SMM. During the course of that training, I along with the founders decided that we need to work on the website of SMAPS too. Along with the training program, I started working on the website. I had multiple discussions with the Founder, Co-founder, and other faculties to understand what their core expertise is. What else they provide training on, what are their plans of expansion. I also spoke to students to understand their expectations and aspirations. All along, I worked closely with SMAPS Sales & Marketing team.

Research

During my several rounds of discussion with its founders, I got a better understanding of what SMAPS is doing at that moment and what it plans to do going forward. How it plans to expand, how it plans to add new courses to the existing module. This helped me while preparing the Information Architecture of the Website. I also did exhaustive Competitor Analysis while working on the website. That helped me in understanding how competitors are approaching this and how it can be done for SMAPS.

User Persona

There were two User Personas that we considered while working on the website of SMAPS.

1. Working Professionals
2. Graduates out of College

Our Primary User Persona was a “Working Professional”. These are people who were either looking to re-skill themselves so that they can switch from the current job or they are training themselves to get better at their current job. They were ideally in the age range of 23 to 32.

The other Persona was graduates/undergraduates freshers, out of College who were looking for jobs and needs to skill themselves. They have completed their college education and are looking to get themselves industry-ready.

Information Architecture

Working with the founder and other employees of the SMAPS, we prepared this Information Architecture. We used techniques like Primary Noun and Card sorting to create the final Information Architecture.

Tools Used

Discover

  • Competitor Analysis
  • Stakeholder interview

Define

  • Gitlab – Product Backlog
  • Mind42 – I.A

Design

  • WordPress

Design

Lessons Learned

  1. Deep dive while designing the Information Architecture
  2. Design for Navigation and Simplicity
  3. Design experience around User Journey
  4. Make search obvious 
  5. Box thing as per the IA, People won’t search for ML courses in UX Design

Final Words

I worked as a trainer with SMAPS as a faculty for 6 months. During that time, I did their website too. The SMAPS website was not very challenging. The founders had a very clear definition and the idea of what they wanted to do. At the same time, analysis of multiple competitor websites helped us understand what we wanted to build. SMAPS website was ready in a month’s time. Since there was no future iteration planned, we stuck to the first version for the next 6 months.